What's under the hood?

Some info to share on my recent migration from Ning to WordPress. About a year ago I really got into Ning because at the time offered everything that I wanted in a ‘blogging’ platform. It offered the ability to blog, create forums, groups, have members, videos, photos and a number of other things all in one space. Flash-forward a year and it’s time to make some changes.

So here’s what under the hood of the new site:

• Self-hosted WordPress blog
• Video channel on Youtube (still migrating content to it)
• Photos on Flickr
• My news off Netvibes
• Feedburner
• Odiogo for my audioblog
• Friendfeed for my Lifestream
• Twitter as my only microblog (I had 2 other Twitter accounts and a dozen other microblogs cross-posted on with Ping.fm)

So here are some of the reasons I moved off Ning:

1) Cost. Ning charges $5 a month to have your own domain name, $25 a month for no ads, and $25 a month for no Ning promotional links. Thee are also some additional premium services which I did not use. Considering all the Ning sites out there, and many of them having some premium services, that’s quite a nice little business for them. I just spent $60 for a domain name and a years worth of hosting from GoDaddy.

2) WordPress’ flexibility has improved. Even 1-2 years ago, I knew that WordPress was the best blogging platform after trying all of the major ones out there. At the time it just didn’t seem to offer everything I wanted. Probably a combination of my increased knowledge, better themes, and better widgets, and WordPress now can do what I want.

3) Ning is not for blogging. I did a post on this back in February. Ning is more like an intranet and the blog platform is for people within the network.

4) Specificity. Finally, my posts were becoming more and more about the military.  Social media and the Army has had a slow start but the momentum has picked up. A year ago  did not feel comfortable being out here as ‘Major Mike Nicholson’. Today I have no issue with doing it and have been increasingly moving towards it anyway. There are tons of social media and communication gurus out there in the world of corporate communications. I just want to now take this and apply what I know specifically towards a more specific segment.

Still have some work to do and expect there will be some minor tweaks along the way, but so far I’m happy with the move.

**Photo taken off of Dirk.Jan’s photostream

It's all about timing

*** The below post has been transferred without comments from another blog which was hosted on Ning. The post has been backdated to its original publishing date ***

I haven’t done a post in awhile, but the reason has been that I am finally able to move forward on a number of social media projects at work. I will provide details in another post and expect that I will be finished by the end of next week. I have been wanting to do some things regarding communications and social media at work but like many things in life, its all about timing. Since I already know what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it, the last 2 weeks have been all about execution. If I didn’t already know and needed to sit down and come up with a strategy, these last 2 weeks would have probably took me much longer. My next post might have some things of interest for those that are looking at getting their organization up-to-speed, especially if you’re starting from scratch, I’ll lay out my own methodology, what I’ve done and why I’m doing it. Until next week, back to punching keys on the keyboard.